How to Improve Your Sense of Humor in 4 Easy Steps

Humor is an essential part of life – when you let it be fun and entertaining with the right perspective, you’ll always find a good joke in every corner. It’s also a great tool for finding a silver lining, no matter how bad things might seem.

But even if you think you’re terrible at tickling other people’s funny bones, you can still develop your sense of humor with enough practice. Here’s how:

1. Know the definition of “funny”
It’s easy to think of humor as something that happens between people, and many tend fall into the trap of focusing too much on what makes “the perfect joke”, or finding “the perfect one-liner”.

However, “funny” goes beyond quips and jokes, and that’s what makes it subjective. It’s better described as something that breaks your expectations of normalcy without presenting any actual danger or harm.

2. Know what you should be looking for
A well-developed sense of humor starts by seeing the funny side to otherwise normal parts of your daily experience.
A lot of things that you find in everyday life can be sources of comedy gold. Even a small, mundane annoyance like mixing in a red shirt in the white laundry can be something you can use to great effect when you tell it to someone else.

So the next time you come across something mildly annoying, instead of being inconvenienced by it, you can instead think, “How can I turn this into a joke?”

3. Spend more time on things that make you laugh
Treat yourself! Everything from TV shows, to movies, podcasts, and internet memes can improve your sense of humor by a great deal. You can even go to comedy bars to get a better grasp on how pros do it.

Hanging out with people who have great senses of humor also helps if you want that knack for the funnies to eventually rub off on you.

4. Know when to time the punchline
The most crucial element of humor is timing: knowing when you should tell the joke or punchline, as well as when you shouldn’t.

Other keeping your comedy appropriate for the occasion, it’s also important to know when it’s time to let a joke die. It might be funny the first time, but when it gets dragged on way too long, it starts to lose its humor and become unfunny instead.

No one is born with a good sense of humor – it’s something you develop over time by interacting with the world around you, and especially by throwing jokes around with your friends.